Dell 1655MC

Here is my story, it is 1:00 AM and a DHL delivery guy just parts for my Dell Blade Server. It is the second parts delivery, they ship right to your location in 4hrs. Dell has great service, however in cases like this service is not enough. You see I am still waiting, it is 2 days later. I have enough parts to make 4 complete servers. I have motherboards, cpu’s, ram, drives, cases, and even chassis parts. But for some reason this thing will not post. And I do mean post. It won’t even display to the screen.

For those of you who are not familure with Blade Servers the 1655MC is sweet. It is a 3U rack mounted case that can hold 6 blade servers. Each server can have up to 2 processors and regular SCSI drives. I have a lot of these guys and have never had issues before. However, recently one just died. I decided not not to do anything, display or post. So I called my dell support. I had parts and a tech at the door in 2hours.

This was at 1:00 PM on Wed afternoon. We tried everything, from replacing the Mother board, CPU’s , and ram. None of that worked. By 7 PM I had gone through 2 techs at the Dell office and another round of parts, more cpu’s and another motherboard. Still nothing. At 1:00 our last round of Cpu’s and motherboards and some other parts showed up.

Even with all that we could not get this thing to post, or even show like it was going to boot. I have talked to everyone at dell, so now a new blade server is on the way. Very frustrating.

I am fortunate because we have redundancy built into all of our servers, and systems. This server ran DNS , secure FTP, and site search. To get things back rolling all I had to do was push DNS to the secondary, move the secure ftp to another server and pull back the config from tape, then also setup the site search from another box. The issue with this is that I did not start the DR migration till around 2:00 AM when we figured we would not be getting the server back.

So here I sit Friday night with more parts, and entire new server worth, and still no luck. We have even changed out the chasis.

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